


Lady Lazarus

by babybirdsitter



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Destroy Ending, Gen, Kaidan is worried, Miranda also used to like poetry, Miranda feels things and she's reluctant to admit it, Post-Reaper War, Shepard is mostly unconscious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-14
Updated: 2016-07-14
Packaged: 2018-07-23 20:48:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7479420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babybirdsitter/pseuds/babybirdsitter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No one expected to find Shepard alive, but they did, several days after the destruction of the Reapers. Now, Miranda finds herself in the same position she had been in before—responsible, once again, for the life of the galaxy’s savior.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lady Lazarus

 

 ** _The second time I meant_ **  
_**To last it out and not come back at all.**_  
_**I rocked shut**_

 ** _As a seashell._ **  
_**They had to call and call** _  
_**And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.** _

**—Sylvia Plath**

 

* * *

 

It was the beeping that Miranda focused on.

She tuned her ears to its high-pitched sound, sensitive to the way it clipped through the silence at regular intervals. She kept her eyes trained on the bed that was a few feet from where she was sitting in the lower right corner of the room she was in. Her shoulders ached from the way she hunched forward, gripping at her knees as she sat near the edge of the chair. 

Miranda started counting.

_One… two… three… four… five…_

She allowed the numbers to consume her, allowed them to fill her otherwise restless mind. With all the beeping and the counting, she hardly noticed the way that she kept holding her breath for all those long drawn out spaces when the heart monitor would fall silent, waiting for the next faint beat to push it to life once again.

 _Life_ , she thought, _how absurd_.

If Miranda were being honest (and she liked to think that she was, at least most of the time), she didn’t expect to make it through the last fight against the Reapers. She had always been a practical woman, and in this regard, she had been pretty level-headed about her odds of survival. Didn’t she already survive _one_ suicide mission? It was a safe assumption that most people didn’t get two.

Miranda didn’t want to be delusional, so she prepared for her fate with the same rigor she mustered for all those Cerberus missions she had worked on in the past.

After she had tracked down her father and made sure her sister was safe from him, Miranda had Oriana and her family placed in a safe house. (Maybe the right word was “safer”, as in, a place that was relatively safer than anywhere else in the galaxy, considering the havoc that the Reapers were making of things all over the Milky Way.) And then she wrote a final letter for Oriana, setting it to be sent directly to her sister’s omni tool approximately five hours after she had to arm herself with a sub-machine gun and join the rest of the galaxy’s forces in the fight for their lives.

At that time, five felt like a good number. Miranda had guessed that it would take her five long hours of fighting before their position would get overrun by Reaper forces and she’d lose all will to live.

She was ready.

But there was that word again. 

 _Live_.

She managed to live.

Miranda was alive and here she was now, two weeks since the end of the war, seated in a room where the lights were dimmed and constantly flickering, where the floors smelled of bleach and a faint hint of rust.

Miranda was alive, and she was in a hospital room, counting the beeping of a heart monitor, with no plans of stopping anytime soon.

_Six… seven… eight… nine… ten…_

She was going to keep counting until Shepard stirred in the bed in front of her.

It was a few days since the fighting stopped when Miranda first heard news about Shepard.

At that time, she was leading a team that was examining Reaper remains for signs of life. They littered almost every corner of war-torn London and no one trusted them enough to stay down. They were huge and imposing and they stuck out awkwardly against the destruction that they left behind. Maybe it was because she was tired and still a little bit high from their victory, but Miranda thought them to be a bit hilarious—just giant robotic squids that looked more like props to a Blasto vid than a real life threat. She was standing near one of the Reapers and fiddling with her omni tool when it alerted her of an urgent call from Alliance brass.

 _Weird_ , she thought. How absurd that the Alliance was now personally reaching out to her, a former top Cerberus operative that they would have happily kept in prison just a few years ago, and she wasn’t even remotely hesitant to answer their call.

Hackett’s voice surfaced through the static.

“Ms. Lawson? We need you in Medical. We found her. Shepard is alive and she needs your help.”

Miranda had been counting since then.

She counted the minutes it took until a shuttle came to pick her up from where she was examining dead Reapers, bringing her to the tented area outside of what was left of an old office building that the Alliance was using as a triage center. And when she arrived, she counted the people—covered in blood or burns, limbs broken or not even there at all—lying down in cots until she lost count at forty-five. And after that, when the Alliance solider escorting her took her past the injured soldiers and the tents housing them, and lead her inside the office building nearby where three doctors were huddled over a single patient, she started counting again. This time she counted the faint beating that pulsed through Shepard’s skin after she finally came forward and pressed two fingers against her friend’s neck.

Her pulse was weak, but it was there.

“She’s alive,” Miranda whispered, not believing it at all.

“She’s _barely_ alive,” said one of the doctors, stepping aside to give Miranda room to examine Shepard’s limp body more closely. “You’re the Cerberus operative that brought her back before? Well, this is a triage center. We’ve done what we can for her but we can’t waste resources on a lost cause. She needs serious medical intervention and we can’t do that here.”

“ _Ex_ -Cerberus,” Miranda corrected the doctor, standing straight and crossing her arms over her chest, even though she knew he was right. 

They were in a decrepit building, with a ceiling that was threatening to give way, walls that were crumbling apart, and floors that were cracked and caked with dust. There were a few windows, but not enough sunlight came through to illuminate the large room. Miranda guessed that it must have housed at least twenty employees before the Reaper invasion had hit. She imagined them huddled over terminals in the cubicles that were now scorched, upturned, and scattered all around them.

She had managed a miracle before, but only because the Illusive Man had given her the resources she needed to pull it off. This was beyond her expertise.

Miranda turned back to the Alliance soldier that had escorted her to see Shepard.

“He’s right. We can’t save Shepard here. Where’s the Admiral?”

“He’s on his way, Ms. Lawson”

Everything that happened next, Miranda had managed to reduce to numbers.

It took eight more minutes until Hackett arrived to tell her that they were going to take Shepard to a hospital that was still largely intact, some three hours away by shuttle. While the doctor she had talked to stayed behind, the other two came with her to make sure Shepard’s vital signs remained stable throughout the ride. The monitor told them that her heart slowed an hour into their journey, and she had to be resuscitated once. Miranda focused on the droning noise of the defibrillator when the doctors turned it on, listened to how the paddles buzzed with electricity for precisely three seconds until they asked her to step aside.

_One, two, three._

_Clear._

 

* * *

 

In the sanitized light of the hospital room, Miranda noted how Shepard looked so peaceful. In one of the few times that she’d hazarded to stand at her friend’s bedside, it was strange to see how Shepard’s features looked softer than ever before.

It was a rare thing to see her like this.

Where she had been covered in blood and burns and grime when Miranda first saw her in the triage center, here, Shepard was all cleaned up. The angry red gashes all over her body had been stitched together, the burns on her arms covered in bandages. And even though much of her face was swollen, her olive-toned skin blooming with splotches of reddish, purplish bruises all over, it had lost the usual edge it wore. Miranda noticed how Shepard’s mouth, for example, had finally relaxed away from the brutish scowl she always had on when she was out in the battlefield, the scope of her sniper rifle locked closely to one eye. Her jaw, even when it needed to be wired back into place during surgery, had also lost the usual tension it held. Miranda remembered how she would always know that Shepard had just finished speaking with the Illusive Man just by looking at her clenched jaw and the way she’d drag her boots as she paced all over the Normandy’s CIC.

Here, with her heart monitor beeping and her IV slowly dripping, Shepard looked worry-free—just fast asleep and stuck in a very, very good dream.

It had been more than a month since Miranda, along with Hackett and the two doctors that came with them, brought Shepard to this hospital. They took her to surgery right away. Lying on top of a gurney, they had Shepard wheeled into an operating room that Alliance soldiers had kept empty while they were in transit by arguing with the hospital staff. It didn’t take much convincing, though. Miranda soon learned that none of the staff seemed keen on killing the hero of the war they all just managed to survive.

“In here!” A nurse had shouted at them, summoning them through a door that had just automatically whizzed open.

“This one’s the room for Commander Shepard.”

Miranda could no longer remember much of the surgery. The little details she could recall included being instructed to change into floral-patterned scrubs, to have her hands disinfected, to put on a mask and gloves. She remembered the sharp, rust-like smell of blood and the clipped voice that came from the surgeon taking the lead as she gave everyone else in the room instructions. She remembered how she let the other surgeons do most of the work, except when it finally came time to deal with the cybernetic implants she had put inside Shepard just a few years ago. And she remembered realizing that, really, if she had to be frank, the implants were the only reason why Shepard made it far enough to be cut open on top of a metal table, under harsh, white lights.

“Cerberus was good for one thing, at least,” one of the doctors had said, his voice muffled underneath the surgical mask he was wearing.

“And good that we have you here, Ms. Lawson,” added the lead surgeon, looking up at Miranda from across the table, where she was elbow-deep inside Shepard’s abdomen. “It would have taken us twice as long trying to figure this all out. The commander clearly doesn’t have that long.”

Miranda had managed to croak out an answer (probably a “no problem”, or maybe just a quiet “yes”) before she began truly working. She couldn’t remember much, but she did remember feeling strange to be poking around her friend’s body in this way, to have her blood smeared all over her gloved hand. She shouldn’t feel strange. She’d done this all before. But now, thinking about how she’d once attempted to install a control chip inside Shepard’s head, Miranda felt something rolling around the pit of her stomach.

She wasn’t sure how long the entire procedure lasted. All she knew was that the sun had already set when they first arrived in the hospital, and when it finally came time to wheel Shepard inside a spare room in the ICU to begin recovering, the sun was already back up.

Shepard had looked much worse back then, and any time Miranda dropped by her room to see how her friend was doing, she felt too scared to actually come up beside her for fear of jinxing something. Shepard had managed to come so far, had managed to defeat the greatest threat in the galaxy, had managed, somehow, to survive. And yet she remained unconscious, with a machine’s constant, mechanical beeping as the only sign that she was alive. Miranda knew her eagerness would only make the hope that Shepard would finally wake up all the more fragile.

The only reason Miranda was looking down on Shepard now was because she thought she saw her stir a little bit. She had been sitting on the chair she had been occupying for a month now—the same chair where she’d sat to focus on counting, keeping eerily still despite the ache in her back and her shoulders—when she caught Shepard’s leg twitch.

At least that was how it looked like from afar. Standing close to Shepard now, Miranda was no longer sure of what she saw. 

“Shepard? Shepard, can you hear me?”

Miranda’s voice was soft, shaky. She’d never spoken to Shepard like this before. Back when they were working with Cerberus, Miranda had always spoken to Shepard with deference and confidence in her voice. Shepard had hated her back then, and Miranda was equally aggravated by her constant need to question everything about their operation. But Shepard had been her commander, and she had been the Normandy’s XO then. She was essentially Shepard’s second-in-command. As much as their earlier conservations quickly disintegrated to aggressive scowling, it would have been unthinkable to talk to Shepard like this: gently, as if she was a helpless child, and with so much fear and sadness.

Shepard kept still and her heart monitor continued beeping in long, drawn out intervals. Miranda sat back down on the chair in the corner of the room and began counting again.

_One… two… three… four… five…_

She’d managed to count up to twenty when the door slid open with an automatic sigh.

“Ms. Lawson?”

Hackett walked to where Miranda was sitting.

“Any new developments?”

Miranda stood up to face the older man, leading him towards Shepard’s bedside. They’d both done this routine before, and it felt mechanical at this point.

“None, Sir. The commander stirred a little bit. I think I saw her leg twitch, but I didn’t notice anything else.”

She wasn’t sure she did the right thing by telling the admiral all this. Miranda was hesitant to allow anyone too much hope, especially the Alliance. Hackett was relentless in his optimism, dropping by Shepard’s room to ask Miranda for updates almost every day since they operated on her.

“We need her,” he had told Miranda once, looking down at Shepard from his position near the foot of her bed.

At that time, all Miranda could think about was how Shepard had once launched into an angry rant in her office after being gone for several days on a classified mission for Hackett. When she came back on board, she’d managed to blow up an entire star system, and later, threatened with the possibility of being court-martialed by the Alliance.

“Those _fuckers_ ,” Shepard said empathically, throwing the last word through gritted teeth. “Those fuckers always need me to get my hands dirty, and I don’t even get a word of thanks.”

Miranda had said nothing, had done nothing but watch Shepard pace in front of her before grabbing the bottle of red wine in the corner of her desk and offering it to her commander.

“We need her,” Hackett had said again this time, now standing beside Miranda on the left side of Shepard’s bed. “Talk to her doctors to see if there’s anything you can do.”

Miranda simply nodded, biting back the urge to tell Hackett that this was something she was already doing quite frequently. They have, in fact, already agreed on the next stages of Shepard’s recovery. All they were waiting for, really, was for Shepard to wake up.

“I’ll do that now. Excuse me, Admiral.”

She kept her voice quiet, and then she turned and walked towards the door. Miranda returned her focus on the beeping of the heart monitor before the door slid shut, muffling the sound coming from behind her.

 

* * *

 

It came as no surprise that, after a while, Miranda quickly grew tired of counting.

Another month had passed since Shepard made it to the hospital and survived her surgery, and yet the only thing Miranda could hear from her was the endless, tireless beeping from the heart monitor she’d been plugged into.

At this point, Miranda was beginning to believe that while Shepard was determined to stay alive, she didn’t seem particularly insistent on being awake to experience what was left of the world she saved. And really, what was there left to experience? Surely, nothing that seemed of interest to Shepard.

The mass relays had, according to Hackett, been destroyed by the same blast that seemed to have killed the Reapers. The Normandy had seemingly disappeared, hard as the Alliance tried to make contact with the ship since it fell off their radars. Miranda didn’t even know which of Shepard’s crew managed to survive. Those of Shepard’s friends that stayed to fight on Earth—like she did—were alive. Grunt had insisted on standing guard in front of Shepard’s room before he had to fly back to the Krogan homeworld with the rest of Arlakh Company. Jacob and Samara had dropped by several times, keeping vigil with Miranda once in a while. But the others, Miranda couldn’t be sure. Communications were still spotty and unreliable, getting cut off every so often. All Shepard would wake up to now was a barrage of bad news. And even if she did finally wake up, all she’d ever see for at least the next couple of months were the beige walls of the same room she’d been stuck in for a while now.

Miranda laughed in spite of herself, imagining how Shepard had cursed at her in the Lazarus Research Station after she’d ordered the commander to grab a gun.

“Wha- what? What the fuck?”

“You don’t have time to wait around, Shepard, just grab the pistol and go.”

She had kept her voice even-keeled and urgent even though she was surprised to hear Shepard’s confused, croaky response. She took it as a sign that Shepard was still herself, despite all the tinkering she had done.  

And so, remembering all this, Miranda continued keeping watch, jumping from her seat every time she thought she saw a leg twitch or an arm move. She was standing at Shepard’s bedside, checking the stats on the machines she was hooked up to, when her omni tool beeped to life.

It was Hackett. _Again_. Miranda didn’t know if she preferred that he’d stopped dropping by in person and resorted to asking for updates through vid calls instead.

“Yes, Admiral, what is it?”

“Ms. Lawson, is Shepard awake?”

“Not yet, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, well, can you run the numbers and try to make an estimate again? This is urgent.”

Miranda was exasperated by the same line of questioning that Hackett always threw at her, but she suppressed the urge to let out a long, exaggerated sigh. She understood, she told herself. She understood why everyone was on edge, anxious for news of the galaxy’s savior.

“What is it?”

“We’ve made contact with the Normandy.”

Miranda’s eyes widened, her gaze trained on Hackett’s face on her omni tool, even if he did look jagged and blurry because of all the static.

“Excuse me?”

Through the screen, she saw the admiral’s professional veneer crack as his lips curled into a smile.

“We’ve made contact with the Normandy,” he repeated, talking faster this time. “Major Alenko is on the other line and he’s asking about Shepard. You should talk to him, be the one to tell him how the commander’s doing. I’m patching him through.”

Hackett disappeared in the gray mess of static. After a few seconds, Kaidan’s raspy voice came through. The reception of the vid call was much, much worse than it was just moments before. Through the screen, Miranda could only make out the shape of his face.

“Miranda?”

“Kaidan! You’re alive!”

“Yeah, most of the crew survived. The admiral said you saved Shepard?”

“We’ve kept her alive so far. I’m checking on her right now.”

The line fell silent and, for a while, Miranda assumed that he had been cut off from the vid call. But Kaidan’s ragged, featureless face remained on her screen, drowned out by the bad reception.

“Kaidan?”

“How… how is she?”

Miranda noticed how his voice changed, how the clarity in his in his voice, how it had dropped and turned into that splintered with a crash against a hard surface.

“She’s still in a coma.”

Kaidan didn’t reply for a while and the only thing Miranda heard from his end was the crackling noise of static.

“Can I see her?”

It was Miranda’s turn to be at a loss for words.

Shepard had markedly improved since she first came to the hospital. The swelling on her face had subsided and the bruising no longer seemed as severe. But her mouth was still wired shut to give her jaw time to heal, and she was still breathing through a tube that they’d stuck down her throat.

 Miranda hadn’t known Kaidan for very long. She didn’t know much about him, other than what most people already knew: that he was a powerful biotic and a dedicated officer of the Alliance. In fact, the only other thing she knew about the man was how much he loved Shepard.

He loved her.

And _she_ loved him.

That much was clear to Miranda when she first met Kaidan after the Collector attack on Horizon. She watched from the sidelines as he accused Shepard of all kinds of things, watched as Shepard—quite surprisingly—kept quiet and allowed him to say whatever he wanted.

Miranda rolled her eyes as he aired his prejudice, annoyed at his short-sightedness at the mere mention of Cerberus. And for the first time, although she wouldn’t have admitted it so readily back then, she worried about how Shepard was going to react after this encounter. Why was she so quiet when, up until that point, any conversation with Shepard usually involved a lot of aggression and hand-wringing? Was she going to abandon their mission out of misplaced loyalty for some man that didn’t even seem to appreciate the fact that she was alive?

It turned out that Miranda didn't even need to worry because Shepard hadn’t said a thing on their ride back to the Normandy. She had, in fact, done nothing when they got back to the ship—except head straight for the Port Observation, drinking herself silly at the bar until Garrus called on Miranda to help get her back to her cabin and changed for bed.

When Miranda had gone to Shepard’s party in the Citadel, more than a year after that incident on Horizon, she wasn’t surprised to see the two of them sitting together for much of the revelry. For most of the party, she saw Kaidan’s arm draped over Shepard’s shoulders or wrapped around her waist. She heard Shepard laugh whenever Kaidan would lean in and close the already small distance between them with a quick kiss to her cheek.

She was having a hard time seeing Shepard in her current state, more than she ever did when she was trying to bring her back from the dead.  The only difference between then and now was the attachment that Miranda had grown for Shepard. It was an attachment that nestled on her chest without her noticing. It had taken a while and it involved a lot of arguing, but eventually, she found herself always seeking out Shepard in the Normandy’s bar and laughing at the mindless stories they shared.

It was an attachment that had stayed, now lodged stuck in her heart. And if attachment was the only measure she had of the fear of having Shepard stuck in this sorry state forever, Miranda was worried about how Kaidan, of all people, would react.

“Miranda, please. I need to see her.”

It was an awkward thing to hear a grown man beg for scraps, to hear him desperate for any type of news, knowing full well that none of it could be any good. Miranda felt uneasy, suddenly aware of the fact that she didn’t belong in this conversation, that she’d somehow stepped into a place where she didn’t belong.

Kaidan’s was an intimate plea—one that wasn’t really meant for her. His intended audience couldn’t hear him, however, so it had to be Miranda.

There really wasn’t much she could do but nod and offer him what she could.

“I’ll hook you up with the security camera here,” she finally replied, trying to talk slowly she could give herself time to choose her words carefully. “But Kaidan, you need to prepare yourself. She doesn’t really look good. She’s alive, but she doesn’t look good.”

“I- I know. I mean, I- I- I can imagine.”

“Okay.”

Miranda fiddled with her omni tool until footage of the room she was in came to view. She zoomed in and focused on Shepard’s still figure lying in the bed beside her.

“Can you see her?”

There was some soft muttering coming from the other line, but Miranda couldn’t make out what it was.

“Kaidan?”

“Yeah,” she heard him say, his voice so quiet it was almost a whisper. “Yeah, I see her.”

“She’s alive,” Miranda said again, still talking slowly, as if the words that just left her lips were some kind of incantation.

“She’s alive,” Kaidan said after a beep of the heart machine, joining in on her invocation.

 

* * *

 

Miranda had been counting, and according to her last computation, it had been exactly fifteen days since Hackett found the Normandy. She never got the chance to speak with Kaidan since then, but someone from the Alliance did pass along the information that the Normandy was now en route back to Earth from where it had made a crash landing in a planet was a few systems and several light-years away.

She was seating on her chair again, its cushioning now feeling softer than ever before. Miranda figured it was because she’d already spent way too much sitting in the same spot. The chair had unsurprisingly given way to her weight, had shaped itself in a way that perfectly cradled her body.

So she felt comfortable, or at least as comfortable as one could ever be inside a hospital room, waiting for her friend’s limp body to move or stir or twitch in the slightest way possible. She was examining a data pad, scrolling through its screen with a touch of a finger. It contained Shepard’s medical chart and she was looking for any sign that something, anything had changed.

Miranda was comfortable, but she was tired.

It was true that she lacked sleep, having spent the last twelve hours working on rough implants for other critical patients in the hospital. But she could live with that. She’d stayed up for much longer before and she always came out of it fine. The thing that made her bones feel old and heavy was this endless vigil. It had been two months—more than, even—and Shepard still remained unconscious and unaware of the world around her.

It had not been long since the end of the war, but Miranda knew that most of the galaxy was starting to work on rehabilitating their home planets and colonies. She’d heard snippets of news from vids playing on screens all over the hospital. She just heard news of the Krogan effort while working on the implants the night before. It made her think of how Grunt had flown off planet months ago, and she wondered if he’d already made it to Tuchanka.

The galaxy was alive and busy. And Miranda guessed that the only reason she hadn’t received any call from Hackett in a while was because he, too, had been bogged down by more important duties. The last time they talked was a little while after Kaidan’s call, where he spoke briefly about how he was organizing the same scientists and engineers that worked on the crucible to repair the Sol mass relay.

The galaxy was alive and starting to heal, but its savior remained oblivious to it all.

Miranda had now scrolled through Shepard’s chart for the ninth time, running numbers and making estimate without finding any significant changes. Every number stayed frustratingly similar to what she saw the last time she checked, and she couldn’t decide whether this was supposed to be good or bad news.

Shepard wasn’t deteriorating, but she wasn’t improving either.

 _Project Lazarus took two years_ , she thought, reminding herself of how frustrated she had been all those years ago, working as hard to bring Shepard back.

 _We’ve barely scratched the surface here. She still has a long way to go_.

Miranda wouldn’t have allowed herself to sound so hopeful if she hadn’t been in this same position before. This wasn’t her betting blindly on a miracle. She’d managed to pull off the same thing before. This was her, simply betting on her abilities.

She had worked tirelessly on the Lazarus Project because the Illusive Man needed Shepard, because Cerberus needed someone to protect human colonies, because the galaxy needed the one person that could defeat the Collectors. And Miranda had been successful. Shepard rose from the ashes like the phoenix of human mythology, as fiery and determined as she had been before she floated to oblivion above Alchera.  

There was no reason she wouldn’t succeed this time.

Still, Miranda felt anxious, like she had been sitting on her hands for far too long. She ran another estimate, scrolling through Shepard’s chart again for the tenth time now. The numbers changed, finally, but the difference was barely worth noting—just a change in the decimal here, another decimal there.

 _Come on, Shepard_.

Frustrated, she tossed the data pad at the bare wall to her left. She watched the data pad fly across the room and felt oddly satisfied when she heard it crash and crack against the hard surface. She stood from her chair and walked towards Shepard’s bed, her high-heeled boots pounding against the tiled floor.

“Come on, Shepard! Wake up!”

Miranda was surprised by how loud she was screaming, but she made no effort to keep her voice down. She felt her hand shaking, so she clenched them tightly into rock hard fists.

“Shepard! You’ve made it this far! You are _not_ going out like this, stuck in a coma and dying from eventual organ failure. Goddamnit! No way, not after you saved the galaxy. Wake the fuck up!”

Her eyes stung, although she wasn’t sure if it was because of the dry air inside the room or if she had actually begun crying. Miranda had made it through the war by being practical, realistic, logical. She could no longer deny what she’d known for a while now. Despite her best efforts, Shepard wasn’t getting any better. And the longer she stayed in the same state, the greater the odds that she was going to stay there for good.

 

* * *

 

Very few people knew that Miranda attended university in Earth for a few years. It had been one of the best moments of her life, studying in Australia alone and, for the first time, free of her father. She didn’t hesitate to drink in the knowledge around her and explore corners of herself that she didn’t know was there before.  

On her first semester, she had decided, quite spontaneously, to take a class on American Literature. They read a great deal. Some books she’d read before when she was younger, but most, she’d only just encountered for the first time in her life. Miranda wasn’t the bookish sort. She liked to read, but she never particularly enjoyed the frills and complications of poetry. When she was assigned to report on Sylvia Plath, she had been at a loss.

Miranda read the collection that she was set to report on for several nights, tearing through the pages with so much deliberate effort. At first, she was confounded by the tome, which, for her, was nothing more than a wall of text she couldn’t crack. But after a while, as she kept reading through it each night, she found that this long-dead poet knew exactly how she had been feeling about her father. And wasn’t that odd? And just a little bit amazing?

Was this what her professor meant about the beauty of literature? That its language, no matter how twisted and how it had been turned upside down, was, at its core, universal?

Miranda kept retreating back to this time in her life as she continued keeping watch in the hospital, checking on Shepard and a few other patients. A few lines from one of Plath’s poems bounced around her head quite often, and while she was a little surprised that she still knew the same words after so many years, she felt comforted by how it suddenly popped into her head one day.

It was like an odd sort of answer to a prayer she had been too afraid to voice out.

 _Dying is an art, like everything else_ , Plath had once written, _I do it exceptionally well_.

The day after she had screamed at Shepard, unaware and lying still in bed, she’d come back inside her friend’s room. Miranda sat in the same spot she’d always been in, pulled out her omni tool, and searched the extranet for a copy of the poem she had been thinking of all day.

 

> _Comeback in broad day_  
>  _To the same place, the same face, the same brute_  
>  _Amused shout:_
> 
> _‘A miracle!'_  
>  _That knocks me out._  
>  _There is a charge_
> 
> _For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge  
>  For the hearing of my heart--  
>  It really goes._

Miranda didn’t really believe in miracles, but then again, who was she to be a skeptic when she’d experienced first-hand the sheer force of one Commander Shepard. She’d seen her take down mercenaries with one headshot after another. She’d seen her size up the Illusive Man, disobey his orders, and blow up the Collectors’ base. She’d seen her survive, time and again, and it was quite embarrassing to have ever doubted her in the first place.

 

> _Out of the ash  
>  I rise with my red hair  
>  And I eat men like air._

She wasn’t in the room when her friend finally woke up. She was in a lab several floors down, tweaking the implants she had built for an asari commando that lost all feeling to her left leg. She’d been hunched over a metal table, propped up by sitting on an uncomfortable stool, when she felt her omni tool buzz from a call.

It was the nurse she’d assigned to keep watch over Shepard while she was gone. The nurse, her face plump and still young, looked terrified. Her eyes were wide and she was breathing heavily.

“She’sawake!”

“What?”

“She’sawake! Shepard! Awake!”

Miranda jumped off from her stool so fast that the force of her leap toppled it over.

“I’ll be right there!” 

“Hurry! Miss Lawson, she’s having a panic attack! I think! I think she’s having a panic attack!”

“Well, go ahead and calm her down, then!”

Miranda barged out of the lab and made a run for the elevator. There weren’t much people, thankfully, and those that littered the halls stepped out of the way when they saw her rushing by. Everyone seemed to have been alarmed by the pounding her boots were making. The sound bounced all over the walls of the hallway, somewhat echoing the frantic beating of her heart.

In her head, she was counting.

It had been seven days—exactly a week—since she had been frustrated, tired, had resorted to screaming Shepard back to life.

Miranda had always felt aggravated by Shepard’s stubbornness. It was absolutely silly, but for once, she was glad that the commander had finally lent her an ear.

The elevator ride up to Shepard’s floor was the longest she’d ever been on. In the time that Miranda was stuck in the elevator, the nurse kept panicking, kept asking Miranda to talk her friend down through the omni tool.

“Please, Ms. Lawson! She’s getting more and more agitated because she can’t talk!”

 _Damn it_. Miranda remembered the brace keeping Shepard’s jaw in place and the tube that was stuck down her throat. Of course she was scared. She’d woken up to a stranger looking over her and now she couldn’t even ask questions or let out her usual string of curses.

Miranda let out a low, throaty growl before setting up a vid call and instructing the nurse to position her own omni tool in front of Shepard.

“Shepard? Hey, Shepard, it’s me.”

She talked loudly and firmly, smiling at Shepard while her friend looked back at her. It was clear to Miranda that Shepard was beginning to tear up, even through the spotty reception of the screen.

“It’s me. It’s Miranda. Listen to me. This is just like the first time, right? You wake up again and you feel like hell, but it’s me you hear. So, relax. I’ll be right there. Sit tight and I’ll be right there.”

Shepard looked like she was still on the verge of crying, but she nodded slowly. Miranda smiled at the screen, feeling an odd combination of excitement and anxiety.

“Good. I’m hanging up now, okay? I’m almost on your floor.”

When the elevator door finally slid open, Miranda ran as fast as she could, her burning calves be damned. And when she made it to Shepard’s bedside, she was out of breath and hunching over, holding on to the bed’s railings for support.

But still, she was smiling.

“Shepard. Hey. Don’t try to talk.”

Shepard seemed to finally relax at the sight of her, no matter how harried she knew she looked. As Miranda straightened herself to face her friend more directly, she saw Shepard starting to slowly lie back down, nodding as she did so.

The nurse adjusted the bed, reclining it upwards just a bit with a swipe of her omni tool so Shepard could sit up comfortably.

“There we go. You’re all good,” Miranda cooed, still smiling. She tucked strands of Shepard’s dark hair behind one of her ears and continued talking.

“Listen, I’m going to count to three and I just want you to focus on your breathing. Okay?”

Shepard nodded again.

“Okay.”

_One… two… three…_

“Good.”

_One… two… three…_

“You’re good, Shepard. You’re good.”

 


End file.
